I had the freezing problem at the first text loading screen but I came up with a fix.

Issue seems to be a race condition or deadlock. I tried turning on debug options but ironically the game didn't freeze, although it was very slow.

Solution is to slow down the game during the first text loading screens by limiting fps to 10, then the limit can be removed and the game runs perfectly fine. I achieved this with mangohud, but it can be achieved with anything else.

1- Set launch options to:

$HOME/launch-rdr-with-fix.sh %command%

2- Create $HOME/launch-rdr-with-fix.sh with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

# mangohud config file
export MANGOHUD_CONFIGFILE="$HOME/mangohud.conf"

# set fps limit to slow down the game
echo 'fps_limit=10' > $MANGOHUD_CONFIGFILE
# wait for 15 seconds in the background while the game loads then remove the limit
# note: increase the sleep duration if it is not enough to get past the loading screens on your system
# note: mangohud reloads config automatically once file changes. if it doesn't, you may have to reload manually with LSHIFT+F4
(sleep 15; echo >$MANGOHUD_CONFIGFILE) &

# launch the game
mangohud "$@"

3- Add exec perms with

chmod u+x $HOME/launch-rdr-with-fix.sh

4- Run game